Greeting cards are bad enough, what with their entirely unfunny "humor" cards (à la the newspaper's "funny pages") and the nauseatingly earnest ones, which only work, if at all, ironically. (It's fun, for instance, to give atheists, pagans and assorted others the solemn Christian ones, just as it might be worthwhile to give the white racist in your life a particularly righteous, Afro-centric offering from Hallmark's Mahogany line. If that same person seems fixated on immigration, maybe a Spanish-language card is in order.) But Mother's Day cards, as much as any others, seem to exemplify the worst greeting card tendencies, tendencies that seem to achieve some grotesque apotheosis in the form of unconventional cards, such as those ostensibly from infant children or
house pets to their respective "mothers."
While the mere idea of them is not nearly as offensive, Mother's Day cards for grandmothers -- yes, I'm a good boy this year -- are, on the whole, horrendous. This particular subset, like a disease, seems to consist entirely of two strains. The first group appears so generic and austere that they could, with minimal editing, serve as condolence cards. The U.S. Postal Service isn't
that slow. Still, that type of card is clearly preferable to the other variety of grandmother cards, those that look like they were created by, or speak in the voice of, a small child, one who, by all appearances, is sweet but probably slow or at least dyslexic. Bless their hearts. I'm sorry, but
even if you've ever referred to your grandmother as "Nana," is it something we should encourage?
